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The devastation of IED blasts

The road is peaceful then literally one second later the IED explodes and all is blood, shattered buildings, and chaos over a very wide area indeed. I had no idea IEDs could do so much damage. Zenpundit assembled the photos from a video made to honor Carl Prine, a combat veteran of Iraq and a military writer. Prine was recently forced to stop writing because of brain damage from an IED like this.

Is Iraq any better off today than it was before we invaded on false pretenses? You tell me. Pakistan and Afghanistan are destabilized now as is much of the Middle East. Much of this is our doing.

I lost a great-uncle in the Bataan Death march, an uncle who died in a fighter jet crash, and a cousin in Vietnam. My wife says, no one ever really recovers from war. I agree.

The traumatized and maimed soldiers, the widows and children who no longer have a father, the “collateral damage”, they never really recover. My father served in WW II as did all his male friends. It wasn’t until recently that I realized that they never talked it. I asked him about that. He said, we had plans, the war happened, and that’s what we did. And he didn’t want to talk about it further.

Another uncle is a retired Marine Colonel who served several tours in Vietnam commanding tanks. He says there’s little that is glorious or noble about war. Instead it was just one long hellish slog.